Category Archives: Religion

Religion

Are We Safer Now Than 20 Years Ago?

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Twenty years ago on September 11, I worked in a cubicle-divided office, starting an uneventful day. One of us, I think my boss, must have checked the news or perhaps got word from family that there had been an attack at the World Trade Center in New York City. I don’t remember that we were aware of the first plane hitting the tower while it was still considered an accident.

We went into the conference room and watched the live broadcast of the burning buildings. I think the second plane hit the tower, but I did not see it. I think I was unable to accept what was happening. Someone said the building would fall or could fall, and I remember saying, “No, that couldn’t happen.” Then it did.

I want to say that the boss sent us all home, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember how the rest of the day went. My children weren’t old enough to know what airplanes or New York City were, and I don’t remember if my wife knew anything about it before I got home.

It’s been 20 years since terrorists attacked New York City with hijacked planes. World News Group’s podcast, The World and Everything in It, has been talking about 9/11 and the Taliban all week. I recommend listening to each one of their 30 minute podcasts. Here are some highlights.

Are we safer now than we were before? With Afghanistan back in the hands of the Taliban, has anything changed? Yes. Many things have changed. Afghanistan is not the same country it was 20 years ago. We’re already seeing resistance to Taliban rule. Though some of our officials repeatedly try failed policies, thankfully they are not in ultimate control.

I think you and I would agree this battle is not primarily man-to-man. It is part of an ongoing spiritual battle. And Christians have never been more or less safe in the hands of the Almighty.

Glory to the Father!
Glory to the Son!
Glory to the Holy Ghost!

As it was in the beginning is now and every shall be, world without end. Amen.

Religion

In the shadow of Babel

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The Tower of Babel, painting by Alexander Mikhalchyk. Wikimedia Commons.

“For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the LORD, but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.” (Proverbs 8:35-36, ESV)

“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening the mob with the news that grass is green.” G. K. Chesterton

I wonder if Chesterton guessed that it would take no more than a century for his prophecy to come true. Today we do live in a world where the most obvious and fundamental things are denounced as falsehoods. (I blame this to some extent on our system of postgraduate education, which requires graduate students to gin up ever more bizarre ideas on which to base their theses.) Today you can get in trouble – lose your job if not your liberty – for saying that boys and girls are different. That men can’t bear children. That babies in the womb are human beings. That race is not a moral category. That America was founded on principles of liberty. That it’s better to live in a liberal democracy than under a Communist despotism. Or an Islamic despotism, for that matter.

I’ve thought a lot about that Proverbs quote up at the top, over the years. The statement comes from Wisdom itself, personified as a woman, who is depicted standing at the crossroads, on the high places, calling out, imploring people to become wise. But they won’t. There are lots of things shinier and more interesting around, things easier to obtain and more fun than wisdom. But the warning comes at the end like a hammer blow – “all who hate me love death.”

And we do love death. Abortion is liberation, in our minds. Young people confused about their gender must be surgically rendered infertile without delay, before they can ever reproduce (abortion in advance). Suffering is not to be endured – better just to help people die peacefully. And the suffering doesn’t have to be that great. There are countries where you can request and receive euthanasia for mere depression. Who are we do judge?

I think there are two great evils in any society. One is poverty – a very great evil which must be fought by all moral means. But the other is prosperity. Prosperity allows us to build a shield – a wall – a screen – between ourselves and the rubs and nuisances of real life. The digital world gives us an unprecedented opportunity to create our own environments, safe and free from any pain we don’t bring into them.

It’s very much like porn. We focus in on an idealized image, and skip all the inconvenience and humbling and discipline of real relationships. We can fashion a world to our own tastes, a world where we need no patience, or hope, or charity.

And it’s killing us. As I contemplate the possible fall of my civilization, I do so with fear. I am old and not very strong, and vulnerable. But I know that the demolition of our Babel may be the only thing (if the Lord tarries) that saves future generations.

Religion, Uncategorized

Delayed Olaf greetings

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I should have noted the Feast of Saint Olaf (Olav) of Norway yesterday. Or even better, the day before, so you’d be prepared to attend mass, as I’m sure you would have wished. Yesterday was Olaf’s feast day in the church calendar, July 29. However (as I mentioned in a book review a while back) I’ve been won over to the revisionist figure of August 31 for the actual date of Olaf’s death. So today will do.

Besides, I’m not all that fond of Olaf. Or of Olav, either.

The short video above invites you to visit the site of the battle, Stiklestad, near Trondheim (I had ancestors from nearby). However, just now you can’t go to Norway unless you’re willing to submit to a couple weeks’ quarantine. So I don’t really recommend it. The video suffers from the presence of short-haired Vikings, a current plague in the reenactment world. Also, I don’t think the scene of the battle was wooded. (You can’t actually stand where the battle occurred anymore, due to slippage of terrain a long time ago.) But the production values aren’t bad.

Tomorrow is my birthday (won’t tell you which one). And Sunday is a family reunion.

I’ll post on Monday, if I survive and avoid arrest.

Religion

Suffer the little children

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“The Last Judgment,” from The Small Passion, by Albrecht Durer, ca. 1510. Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

I had a theological idea the other day. It gave me great enjoyment when it occurred to me, but it also worried me. In 2,000 years of church history, I can’t be the first person to think about this, but I’ve never heard it discussed in these terms. Probably because the idea is fraught with danger. And I do care about orthodoxy.

One of the things that troubles me, in my long sleepless nights, is the thought of all the “wasted” people who’ve ever lived. Not wasted in the modern sense of being destroyed by alcohol or drugs. Wasted in the older sense – people simply thrown away. Discarded. The Gospel teaches us that there is nothing more precious than a human soul (think of the parable of the Lost Sheep). But uncounted millions of people have been born into slavery or peonage, worked without respite all their short lives, and then left to die… or killed. Like animals. Also, so many have died young, with no chance to live. Not to mention those aborted.

“What will the Lord do with such people at the Last Judgment?” I’ve often wondered.

And then I remembered an important Christian doctrine. It’s even in our creeds. The Resurrection of the Body. When I was a kid I thought that meant Christ’s resurrection, but it doesn’t. It refers to the resurrection of our bodies, the bodies of every human being who’s ever lived.

At the Last Judgment, every human who ever lived will get their bodies back.

And a picture came into my mind, of a great throng of those “wasted” children, crowded around the throne of Christ, who will do the judging according to Scripture.

I remembered that in the Old Testament, judgment doesn’t always mean condemnation. It also means the place where the poor can get justice against their oppressors.

And then the picture of Jesus surrounded by little children gave me a strong sense of peace.

I can’t make a doctrine out of it. It would be wrong to do that. Universalism must be resisted at all points.

But I feel good about this.

Religion

In China, A Christian in a Bad Church May Have No Options

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PastorZhang San writes, “As Christians living under a communist regime—the Chinese Communist Party was founded 100 years ago [Thursday] —there is a sense in which we are blessed. As Proverbs 30:8–9 says, ‘Give me neither poverty nor riches . . . lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?” or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.’”

But churches hide from strangers to guard themselves against being reported to the state. If a believing family wanted to find more biblical teaching than they are receiving at their current church, they may not be able to find another congregation.

My Life as a Christian Under a Communist Regime
Religion, Uncategorized

In praise of virtue I do not possess

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Photo credit: Jeff Ochoa@jeffochoa, Unsplash

No book to review tonight. So, you’re stuck with my deep thoughts. “I got a million of ‘em,” as Jimmy Durante (or somebody) used to say.

Back on Memorial Day I was talking about how young men are (usually) risk-takers. I got to wondering, “What’s the survival value of youthful risk-taking?” Its value would seem to be the opposite of survival.

(I don’t want to get into the Creation vs. Evolution thing here. I think survival value is a real thing, created by God. It’s just the way He designed things to work.)

One would assume that Nature (whether intelligently designed or not) would want young people to stay safe until they grew up. So they’d go on to produce further offspring.

But in fact, Nature drives young men (typically) to go out and try to kill themselves. Drag-racing. Sky diving. Rock climbing. Joining gangs or (sometimes more responsibly) armies. Experimenting with drugs. Asking cheerleaders out on dates.

(I, of course, never did any of these things myself. But there were consequences to playing it safe.)

The point, I think, is that Nature is wise, and under God’s governance. As I’ve mentioned before, I believe that God is a storyteller. His book of Nature is not an equation or formula. It’s partly about science, but it’s also about love and hate and ideals and passions. And one of the things storytelling tells us is that safety is not first. “Who dares wins.” “Faint heart ne’er won fair lady.” “Do not take counsel of your fears.”

Both in the spiritual and the physical worlds, too much caution is fatal, at least in the aggregate. Cowardice would appear to have survival value, but it doesn’t. Cowardly communities do not thrive. Courage kills off some of its acolytes, but those who survive end up running things and making progress.

I think churches often work too hard to produce guys like me. The Kingdom is for risk-takers – “Men of violence take it by force.” (Matthew 11:12) In a feminizing world, we need to provide a place where risks can still be taken, wounds bound up, and locker room speeches delivered. To young men with skinned knees and black eyes.

Religion, Writing

Making new friends through novel writing

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Nicolai Cleve Broch as Saint Olav in the annual Stiklestad Play, near Trondheim. Photo by Leif Arne Holme/NRK, 2004.

Enjoyed a minor writer’s pleasure today, as I worked on the new Erling book.

I went over this one scene I’d added during the last revision. I always feel uncertain about inserted scenes, worrying that the graft might not take (even though most of the time I insert them precisely because I feel something’s missing at that point).

But it did work. Quite well, actually. Not only dramatically, but emotionally. The scene moved me, in fact. Which is always a surprise, like playing a practical joke on yourself.

The scene centered on King Olaf Haraldsson – Saint Olaf. Who is, in the great scheme of the series, the villain. In spite of the fact that he’s the patron saint of my second favorite country, the man was a totalitarian. Also a heretic, in my view, because I consider the use of violence in evangelism heretical. So I approached this project prepared to give him a waxed mustache and a black top hat.

But a funny thing happened as I wrote. I started getting under his skin. The first breakthrough came some years back, when I was talking about Olav’s life with a (longsuffering) friend.

I told him about a story from the Icelandic Flatey Book, not included in Heimskringla (the usual source). Flatey Book explains how Olaf was named after an ancestor, a great king called Olaf Geirstad-Elf, believed to have had supernatural powers. In the old heathen religion, naming a child after a recently dead relation was thought to cause a sort of reincarnation. The new baby was believed to be, in some sense, that ancestor reborn. (Yes, they also believed in Valhalla. And they believed the ancestor slept in his grave mound. Consistency played no part in their theology.) So Olaf was raised believing that he was really a wizard who’d lived before. His foster father Rani even dug into Olaf Geirstad-Elf’s grave mound and removed the ancient family sword, Besing, which was then given to young Olaf.

But Olaf sailed abroad as a Viking, saw a bit of the world, and chose to be baptized a Christian. We’re never told what he thought of his supposed reincarnation, in light of his new faith.

But there’s a story in Flatey Book about how he rode his horse one day past his ancestor’s grave mound. And suddenly a terror came over him. He turned his horse around and galloped off, giving orders that no one should stray near that mound again.

As I told that story to my friend, I suddenly felt I had an insight into Olaf’s psychology. He’d had a traumatic experience there at the grave mound. It instilled in him a terror of the old religion, a fear that he’d be sucked back into the power of a horrific ancestral curse. This helped explain his whole approach to Christianization.

I don’t think I’ll ever be an Olaf booster. His actions are too repellant.

But I think I’m beginning to sympathize with him. A little.

Which leads me to the inevitable thought…

After a thousand years dead, this S.O.B. is charming me! No wonder they made him patron saint!

Religion

How Does God Treat His Friends?

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Many months ago, I wrote a few blog posts about the book of Job because I had studied it while leaning on Christopher Ash’s excellent commentary in the Preaching the Word commentary series from Crossway. He has revisited that content for a new book no doubt aimed at a general readership.

The new book is called Trusting God in the Darkness. He answers a few questions about Job on the Crossway blog.

The central character, Job himself, is not just everyman, a human being in general. No, he is most emphatically a man who is “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). The narrator tells us this in the first verse and God says it twice more (Job 1:8; 2:3). That is to say, Job is a believer walking through life with a clear conscience. The book of Job is—to quote the title of a book that first helped me get into studying Job—about how God treats his friends. It is about the struggles of a suffering and yet innocent believer.

How should we understand Job’s comforters? “Much of what they say seems to make a lot of sense,” but God rejects their words in the end.

When we read their speeches we need to think carefully. Sometimes they say things that are true but that don’t fit Job. They accuse him of being an unforgiven sinner, and he isn’t. Most seriously, there is no place in their thinking for innocent suffering (e.g., Job 4:7), which means that, in the end, there is no place in their theology for the cross of Christ.

Music, Religion

Sissel sings ‘Amazing Grace’

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The tale of my day is short and sweet. Quick translation job, under a deadline. Dedicated labor. Then a revision. Also, in the vacant spots, I did the laundry.

Here’s Sissel with something approaching the best arrangement of “Amazing Grace” ever recorded. I think it’s slightly different from a version, quite similar, which she recorded at a later date (arranged by Andre Crouch). Unless I’m mistaken.

Have a good weekend.

Music, Religion

‘Near the Cross’

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Today is Good Friday. One of my favorite songs about the Cross of Christ is “Near the Cross,” lyrics by Fanny Crosby. My old musical group used to sing this in harmony. I looked for a worthy arrangement to post, and this was the one I found that pleased me best. Done by three sisters of whom I know nothing at all. They’re not as good as my buddies and I were, but it will do.